“Things They Won’t Tell You”: Black Teachers’ Discourse on Teaching in Taiwan and the Realities of Racialized Professional Mobility

Taiwan’s Bilingual 2030 policy has expanded the recruitment of foreign English teachers by redefining eligibility through official language status rather than national origin, enabling educators from countries such as the Philippines and South Africa to enter Taiwan’s English language teaching (ELT) sector. Despite this policy shift, the experiences of Black educators within Taiwan’s bilingual education landscape remain underexplored. Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional critical discourse analysis framework alongside Critical Race Theory and intersectionality, this study examines a corpus of YouTube vlogs posted by ten Black English teachers working across Taiwan’s public and private educational sectors. Through thematic and critical discourse analyses, the findings demonstrate that although formal policy structures promote standardized salaries and procedural equality, racialized professional hierarchies continue to shape teachers’ lived experiences. Participants reported experiences of accent policing, skepticism toward professional qualifications, and the persistence of white normative privilege within institutional and social interactions. These experiences were further mediated by unequal economic positioning associated with teachers’ national origins and mobility trajectories. At the same time, vloggers employed digital platforms to exercise agency, negotiate professional identities, and establish informal support networks in response to limited institutional support. The study contributes to scholarship on global ELT and migration by illustrating how colonial ideologies of linguistic legitimacy are reproduced within ostensibly race-neutral policy frameworks. It further argues that formal equality in recruitment and compensation does not necessarily translate into substantive professional equity for racialized educators in transnational teaching contexts.